A Palestinian youth climbs a barbed wire barrier with a picture of the late South African leader in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. Photograph: Nasser Nasser/AP

The death of Nelson Mandela has given fresh impetus to Palestinian efforts to portray the Israeli occupation as a form of apartheid that should be confronted with a similar international campaign that took on South Africa's white regime.

Mandela's message of solidarity from a 1997 speech in which he said "our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians", has been repeatedly invoked across Palestine in the past week.

Demonstrators carried posters of Mandela who also strongly criticised Israel's close ties to the apartheid government, at regular weekly protests against Jewish settlements and the vast concrete and steel separation barrier in the West Bank on Friday. Israeli troops fired teargas, rubber-coated bullets and water cannon to disperse protesters, injuring dozens.

Congregations lit candles to honour Mandela's life at packed services and masses at churches across the West Bank on Sunday. At the Holy Family Church in Ramallah, Father Raed Abusahlia's sermon included many references to biblical figures, with unmistakeable parallels to the man who led the struggle for justice in South Africa.

The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said Mandela's death was "a great loss to Palestine". He was, he added, "a symbol of liberation from colonialism and occupation for all peoples".

Khaled Meshaal, the political leader of Hamas, said Mandela was an inspiration "for nations suffering injustice and resisting occupiers".

Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail who is sometimes described as a potential "Palestinian Mandela", wrote an open letter to the late South African leader: "From within my prison cell, I tell you that our freedom seems possible because you reached yours. Apartheid did not prevail in South Africa, and apartheid shall not prevail in Palestine.... The ties between our struggles are everlasting."

On Wednesday, 12 Palestinian human rights groups published a statement commemorating Mandela, saying "the success of the South African struggle against apartheid... provides us with faith that we, the Palestinian people, will also succeed in our struggle against the Israeli occupation and its practices of apartheid and colonialism."

Israel is struggling to counter a widening global campaign likening its treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid – an assertion that for many years was regarded as a marginal view but which has gained currency because of the failure to establish a Palestinian state. Comparisons between the former regime in South Africa and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories have become relatively commonplace – not just by Palestinians and their supporters, but also among Israelis and the international community.

When Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid appeared in 2006, the former US president was accused of anti-semitism for saying Israel operated a "system of apartheid" in the Palestinian territories. The same year, a Guardian article which made a detailed comparison between contemporary Israel with apartheid-era South Africa was greeted with outrage in some quarters.

But, since then, warnings of an Israeli form of apartheid have been made by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, former intelligence chiefs Ami Ayalon and Yuval Diskin, as well as other public figures in Israel, academics, analysts, UN investigators and human rights groups.

In a 2007 report, John Dugard, then a UN special rapporteur and a former South African professor of international law, said: "Israel's laws and practices certainly resemble aspects of apartheid."

"The 'A-word' used to be taboo, but this has changed as the situation has changed," said Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa. "The situation that has developed in the West Bank over four and a half decades is a kind of apartheid. If you compare the suffering of black people in South Africa under 40 years of apartheid, and the suffering of the Palestinians under 46 years of occupation, I don't know who suffered more."

He said the apartheid comparison was only valid in the West Bank, where Palestinians and Israeli settlers are subject to separate legal systems and have different access to land, water, natural resources and freedom of movement.

But Shawan Jabarin, director of the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, said Palestinians on both sides of the pre-1967 Green Line were living under a regime of apartheid, defined as "a systematic, institutionalised policy of discrimination against ethnic groups for the benefit of other ethnic groups".

He cited current efforts by the Israeli government to forcibly move thousands of Bedouin Arabs off their ancestral land in the Negev desert into state-designated towns as an example of apartheid policy. "What we have is occupation, apartheid and colonialism at the same time. It's not a copy of South African apartheid, it's more complex – and it's worse."

Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, said the claim that Israel was operating an apartheid-type regime was "a libel that simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny". He added: "This is the Palestinians' marketing strategy to the international community. They are trying to artificially shroud themselves in Mandela's aura. It's a way of avoiding making necessary concessions."

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's executive committee, who knew Mandela well, said he had "internalised the Palestinian issue, it was his issue, it wasn't just a question of solidarity. It is a question of self-determination, freedom, human dignity, human rights, persistence. These are the things the two struggles have in common."